Saturday, October 15, 2011

Prehistoric Artist Paint Factory





Monday, October 03, 2011

Learning Games Through The Ages

Plato observed one could learn more about another person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Learning though play and games is primal. The word game stems from old English gamen– meaning joy, fun, amusement. This is echoed in the ancient Greek en Theos meaning god within, the basis of enthusiasm. A special kind of learning occurs during play and games when students are enthusiastic and joyful. The following is a brief, incomplete survey of some innovative learning games through the ages. It's inspired by and builds on Don Pavey’s Art-Based Games published in 1979.

Arenas: A circle provides the basis for learning games in many different cultures. The arena is the most common example. Spectators sit around the circumference and are able to watch the game play from all points. In some cultures, such as the Maya, these games were sacred events of life and death.
Mandalas: Mandala’ is "circle" in Sanskrit. It symbolizes the cosmos. Its root words are manda, meaning essence and la, meaning to partake. Mandalas generally feature four cardinal points. Working co-cooperatively, each area is filled in with color. In Buddhism this is meant to bring together the four attributes - loving kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity.

Medicine Wheels:
Medicine wheels made of stone are found throughout the high plains of North America. The First Peoples of this continent created them to symbolize Mother Earth. Some are 5,000 years old. Many have diameters of 70 feet. Like Mandalas these are also divided in four cardinal points. Medicine Wheels are still reverenced by today’s First Peoples. They are also called Sacred Hoops.

Snakes + Ladders: The popular board game Snakes + Ladders was invented in India about three millennia ago. In the 13th century C.E. The Tibetan monk Sa-pan created a Buddhist version for educational purposes and as occupational therapy [Pavey, 1979]. Sa-pan’s innovation featured “a table of Buddhist moral and spiritual principles ... [A] throw of the dice determined the aspirant’s progress towards liberation” [Pavey, 1979:7.8]. The ladders are located on squares representing various types of good. The more numerous snakes are based in squares representing various forms of evil. The good squares allow a player to evolve higher in life whereas evil will throw a player back through the aegis of reincarnation to lower levels of existence. The last square represents Nirvana or transcendence. Sa-pan wrote: Words have no real pith. By means of a dharma of conventional usage one will not gain enlightenment. He understood effective learning is done intuitively, non-verbally, and creatively. 

Putting It Together, Taking It Apart: Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852) is considered the creator of the modern kindergarten. Compare Froebel’s thinking with that of Sa-pan several hundred years earlier - "The mind grows by self revelation. In play the child ascertains what he can do, discovers his possibilities of will and thought by exerting his power spontaneously. In play he reveals his own original power." (Froebel, Education of Man) [www.froebelfoundation.org] Froebel believed that humans are essentially productive and creative - and fulfillment comes through developing their gifts. He went on to create special materials [such as shaped wooden bricks and balls], a series of recommended activities…and movement activities, and a linking set of theories [www.infed.org].

Surrealist Games: In the 1760s, an English schoolteacher – John Spilsbury – developed a teaching tool made of dissected puzzles in order to assist children’s studies of history and geography [Pavey, 1979]. Another example is the nineteenth century ‘Metamorphosis game’ which consisted of a set of tiles or slabs with dissected images on each face” [Pavey, 1979:9]. The introduction of the jigsaw, which could turn out mass produced standard cut out shapes, revolutionized the use of dissected puzzles for learning and for social leisure activities. The early 20th century Surrealists created their own versions of these older games of dissected images including Hybrid, Cadavre Exquis “a version of the party game ‘Heads, Bodies and Legs’ in which they drew objects and landscape as well as human and animal details. After each portion was finished it was covered with paper so that the next artist would not be influenced by what went before. These exercises did a great deal to stretch the imagination of players and to show how plastic and malleable our conceptions of reality are. 

Collaborative Creative Play: Certain art-based games naturally encouraged creative collaboration. Pavey was “particularly interested in the Bauhaus idea of integration, and in their group exercises and experiments which aimed at training both the intellect and the emotions” [14]. This helped establish a certain appreciation within education that ‘play’ as a serious element could lead to ‘purposeful results’ through largely non-verbal and non-didactic means. For example, Vige Langevan, the WWII French Resistance fighter, animated all sorts of striking collective mural painting with large numbers of children.

Montessori: Maria Montessori [1870–1952] was an Italian educator and physician who pioneered the use of basic games or play exercises using colours and forms. Montessori was also the first woman in Italy to ever receive a medical degree. Echoing Sa-pan, Froebel, and the Bauhaus, Montessori practitioners believe that individuals and groups learn best through self-directed exploration and discovery. She developed a suite of tools and learning games designed to further individual and group abilities and interests. Teacher observers intervene only if help is needed. Pavey [1979] also examined initiatives like the Islington Circle Project, a maze-painting system in which children painted large mazes up to 40 feet in diameter.

Glass Bead Game: In 1949, Herman Hesse described a multidimensional, international game played in the 23rd century. The Glass Bead Game attempts to unite science, mathematics, logic, philosophy, art, music, and spirituality into a single grand theory. The players play the glass bead game by identifying and correlating the knowledge of different times and cultures – and creating unique but intellectually rigorous theses or artifacts - thus establishing entirely new and plausible departure points for further inquiry, that also become grist in the game’s ever-spiraling whirl. The winner becomes a Magister Ludi, or Master of the Game. At the heart of Magister Ludi is an understanding of creativity and learning as a kind of bricolage. Bricolage is defined as “something that is made or put together with whatever materials happen to be available” [Encarta World English Dictionary]. Western education and art derive from this approach. Five hundred years ago, a Master of Arts degree holder was someone who has successfully ‘joined together’ several ‘branches of learning’. In the 1960s, Jerome Bruner advocated has therefore less to do with learning facts and more about learning how to connect ‘the dots’ and identify the hidden patterns they create. Indeed, this dynamic, unpredictable lateral, synthetic, and transformative capacity is the basis of all creativity, invention, and innovation. Learning games can help us to grasp the holistic, systemic nature of our connection to each other and to our greater world. There is a growing recognition of their value and increasing use today. What was old is new again....